LiteOn LDW-851S DVD +/- R Review

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Dev Hardware Recomended Just because we're a hardware review site doesn't mean that we don't go out and buy our own home equipment. When we find something extremely good (or extremely bad), we find our reviewer instincts tingling and make sure to share our findings with our audience. Veteran Dev Hardware writer, Memphist0 takes a critical look at one of his recent purchases, the LiteOn LDW-851S DVD +/- R. Here's one he's been happy with, but read the rest to find out why.

Let me guess -- you have been holding off buying a DVD writer, waiting for the media to become more reliable, the drives to become faster, or double layer media to become available. I was in the same boat. Like most people, when the first writers came out at 2.4x, I was interested. I decided to wait after hearing stories of incompatibility issues with standalone DVD players, DVD-ROM drives, sometimes even with other DVD-RW drives. And then there was the extremely high price. Not to mention that at 2.4x it would take nearly a half an hour to burn one disk. Then 4x drives came out with rumors 8x drives were around the corner. Finally, 8x drives came out and the prices dropped to around $100, with the 12x drives looming on the horizon.

It was at about this time that I decided to jump in. If I continued to wait until the next great thing came out, I’d never buy one (and I really needed to back up nearly 3 years of digital pictures). The capacity of CD-Rs was not going to cut it, and I realized that an 8x drive could burn a DVD in under 10 minutes (7.5 + lead) while a 12x drive would burn the same disk in just over 5 minutes (5 + lead). I could certainly live with this.

So what other issues can be expected from a DVD-RW drive? Let's take a look at LiteOn's LDW-851S and see how it does.